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Your 5K upper limit for BA Shopping is way too pessimistic. There are plenty of offers on with thousands of avios available. For example, my home insurance policy alone got me 3,500 avios (for something I was going to buy anyway).
Then there’s wineflyer with frequent offers of thousands of avios on top of the regular avios earned on the bottles.
Indeed, I use it as often as I can but am lucky enough to be able to funnel weekly work hotel bookings for myself and some colleagues through it. Earned 57,192 Avios on the eStore via Hilton, IHG, Marriott Hotels.com in 2024, with a grand total of 459k since I started using it in 2021.
Are you the only person to have successfully earned and retained Avios for Hilton bookings through that platform?
Not sure @Aston 100, you would need to ask @JDB this question to learn whether this is the case or not given he will of course have access to the IAG Loyalty’s data like he does everybody else’s.
I did, however, suffer the same Hilton issues as most last year on the BA eStore.
All of my Hilton transactions on the platform tracked last year, but Circa 11K’s worth were either clawed back or cancelled incorrectly. I use a separate browser only for eStore transactions due to previous issues and never accept this.
The reason given by eStore for all of the above was that the last click was from a 3rd party, not the eStore. The same nonsense as I have had many times over the years. As normal the merchant couldn’t provide any evidence of this and I suggested Awin, Hilton’s affiliate partner was pulling IAG Loyalty’s pants down and escalated it to Adam Daniels as a result. His team investigated, (hence Hilton being removed from the program towards the end of last year) and agreed with me. I was awarded all of the missing transactions from IAG Loyalty with a single credit.
Ironically Hilton have been back on eStore for about 3-4 weeks so it will be interesting to see if Awin have changed their ways as a result, too early to tell yet but Hilton transactions are tracking again.
Your 5K upper limit for BA Shopping is way too pessimistic. There are plenty of offers on with thousands of avios available. For example, my home insurance policy alone got me 3,500 avios (for something I was going to buy anyway).
Then there’s wineflyer with frequent offers of thousands of avios on top of the regular avios earned on the bottles.
Likewise I got 5,000 Avios for taking out a broadband contract with Vodafone that I was going to take anyway. Pretty sure last year I also got 3,500 or so for a car insurance policy.
Your 5K upper limit for BA Shopping is way too pessimistic. There are plenty of offers on with thousands of avios available. For example, my home insurance policy alone got me 3,500 avios (for something I was going to buy anyway).
Then there’s wineflyer with frequent offers of thousands of avios on top of the regular avios earned on the bottles.
Indeed, I use it as often as I can but am lucky enough to be able to funnel weekly work hotel bookings for myself and some colleagues through it. Earned 57,192 Avios on the eStore via Hilton, IHG, Marriott Hotels.com in 2024, with a grand total of 459k since I started using it in 2021.
Are you the only person to have successfully earned and retained Avios for Hilton bookings through that platform?
Not sure @Aston 100, you would need to ask @JDB this question to learn whether this is the case or not given he will of course have access to the IAG Loyalty’s data like he does everybody else’s.
I did, however, suffer the same Hilton issues as most last year on the BA eStore.
All of my Hilton transactions on the platform tracked last year, but Circa 11K’s worth were either clawed back or cancelled incorrectly. I use a separate browser only for eStore transactions due to previous issues and never accept this.
The reason given by eStore for all of the above was that the last click was from a 3rd party, not the eStore. The same nonsense as I have had many times over the years. As normal the merchant couldn’t provide any evidence of this and I suggested Awin, Hilton’s affiliate partner was pulling IAG Loyalty’s pants down and escalated it to Adam Daniels as a result. His team investigated, (hence Hilton being removed from the program towards the end of last year) and agreed with me. I was awarded all of the missing transactions from IAG Loyalty with a single credit.
Ironically Hilton have been back on eStore for about 3-4 weeks so it will be interesting to see if Awin have changed their ways as a result, too early to tell yet but Hilton transactions are tracking again.
I’m very impressed!
Well done.I think my personal spend probably only gets me 50-100k per year, which isn’t terribly useful. However I’m also in the lucky position of having a business that can put a lot of spend through card purchases and that gets me to around 1m per year in total.
I prefer to click through TCB and use that to buy avios through avios boost. Much more reliable than BA shopping and gives you an option to retain cash. Shame they closed the direct Avis route at TCB.
But merchants are getting more sophisticated and such click throughs result in higher prices. Especially the tech savvy insurance providers probably have dozes of variables in their calculations- I won’t be surprised if a mobile browser gives a diff number for same person compared to a desktop.
Typical monthly haul (in thousands) for me might be Amex 6, Curve Fronted 4.5, Barclays Premier 1.5, eStore 5.
You would need to spend up to £10k a month to generate that. Unless you’re putting business expenses through, most people won’t hit those kind of numbers.
Typical monthly haul (in thousands) for me might be Amex 6, Curve Fronted 4.5, Barclays Premier 1.5, eStore 5.
You would need to spend up to £10k a month to generate that. Unless you’re putting business expenses through, most people won’t hit those kind of numbers.
I don’t really think of it in monthly amounts as they are just the padding, but there are usually a few one off annual bonanzas, even without churning, albeit not currently ones like Barclays in 2022 with the 50k Avios Plus offer and the 100k+25k Premier offer.
For the monthly amounts, some of those mentioned above are probably tax via Curve Fronted rather than discretionary spend. If one has tax to pay outside PAYE, for a couple that’s 108k Avios/year and Council Tax another 6-7k.
Typical monthly haul (in thousands) for me might be Amex 6, Curve Fronted 4.5, Barclays Premier 1.5, eStore 5.
You would need to spend up to £10k a month to generate that. Unless you’re putting business expenses through, most people won’t hit those kind of numbers.
Not at all true – it’s the same spend earning multiple times. £4K monthly spend on Amex, using Curve Fronted to the max to repay it. EStore retailers typically give about 8 Av/£ so it needs about £600 of that same spend to be through that channel.
£4K per month on a credit card is more than the average UK family has to spend, but not by much.
I’m just amazed at how low all these numbers are. Everyone just needs to think a little harder.
Yet another “somebody else on the internet is different to me thread”. Some people just put a lot of money through credit cards because they spend a lot of money.
It feels like the takeaways are:
– It’s only remotely achievable if you use someone else’s avios earnings as well, and even then won’t get you close enough
– Companion voucher isn’t feasible to be used every year for long-haul flights
– Same would potentially apply with the Barclays upgrade voucher – which is a shame as it can be poor value on short-haul
– You could pay for avios, hopefully when a bonus is on. Which isn’t certain and risky you’ll get decent valueBA’s target market for these vouchers isn’t going to know all these subtleties, so that’s a lot of wasted vouchers. It would almost make more sense for Amex/Barclays to issue a voucher only once every two years, with a lower card fee.
Even if you’re Blue, you still get 6 Avios per £ spent, so 15,000 isn’t unreasonable. Remember you get 3 Avios per £ for spending on BA on the Amex too.
The BA Avios e-store should get a lot more than 10,000 a year too. A week stay at a Marriott resort in Greece last year netted me 13,000 alone.
We shop at Waitrose and only ever get the bonus Nectar products and get minimum 250 Avios per week from this.
I pass an Esso station so get fuel from there which gets Nectar points but BP also give Avios.
The BA Avios e-store should get a lot more than 10,000 a year too. A week stay at a Marriott resort in Greece last year netted me 13,000 alone.
Very much so. I’ve just booked a single night in Athens that will earn me 3,800 Avios (20% rate at the moment with Avios hotels). As a bonus, the hotel rate was already cheaper than booking through other channels, so the Avios are better than free.
This might be an exceptional year, but 2 years ago, my Husband and I got married, and embarked on our Amex/Points journey (we’d never had a points earning credit card before this – in fact this is my very first HfP post!)
I don’t have to hand a s/s which details all our spend to date across our cards, so I’ve just used the spend required to hit SUBs to calculate an estimate for Avios/MR points earnt.
However, in year 1, between us, we earnt 700k Avios, 2 Barclays Upgrade Vouchers and 2×241 BA Vouchers.
We made use of the following offers 2x Barclay 100k offers, Barclays Premier Banking, 2 Amex Plat enhanced SUBs, enhanced SUB on 1 x BAPP, plus P1-2 Referrals, and other referrals, and additional points for supplementary cardholders.
In terms of what it cost us, if I added up the card fee’s for all cards less any pro-rata fee refunds we spent about £1,500 on fees. If I include, all other statement credits (Harvey Nicks, Dining Credits, Travel Credits) we spent in total £1.75!
You might ask what the cold hard cash spend was to achieve the above, so, again, just taking the cash spend required to hit the SUBs across all the cards- it was about £40k. (Which given this encompassed a year of ordinary living and spend towards a wedding – we didn’t think was unreasonable spend within a year!)
When I say every purchase when on a points on card – I mean every single £ did. If I wasn’t sure how to purchase something to maximise points, I searched this forum for advice. I mapped out spend for SUBs across my cards, and researched in advance what vendors did/didn’t take Amex so I could map and more importantly time our spend accordingly. I also made use of a 0% BT from Amex to Santander, which again helped in points collecting, but stretched out our payment terms for 12 months.
We still have some of those Amex/Barclay cards now – and we’re now into our 2nd/3rd year of points collecting, but still living off that original points haul!
Still now though, every £ goes on a points earning card, CT/Energy/Groceries/Coffees out etc. Also, the BA E store is great, we bought a new Mattress and could have earnt 15k points on the estore (we didn’t, as we wanted the sale to be credited to the in-store lady who went above and beyond for us) but the estore can be a powerful tool for points collection.
Again, all big ticket items, I research in advance and map spend to what SUB are available to achieve, or do a quick assessment based on the cards we have – to identify what payment option maximises points collection.
Wow @CocoOnTheGo 👏👏👏
After seeing that I thought I would take a look and most of our 400k Avios or MRs come from Amex spend or Amex SUBs. A fair chunk (20k each) is eStore and BA Avios Hotels. Uber was a pointless 90 and chain hotels an equally pointless 400.
I was almost tempted to book our next Maldives hotel to BA Avios Hotels, but D2’s discount was pretty much equivalent to the Avios bonus. That was before the 20x offer though so I would have made more with BA but the resort is now no longer bookable and the water villa we want sold out.
I clearly need to try harder!
I spreadsheet my Avios earning because I can be a geek sometimes… well often!
But that means I can tell you I “organically” (credit cards, shopping, flying) earn about 100,000 Avios a year. A bit over half of that is on credit cards, with Nectar, BA Shopping portal and flying making up most of the rest.
You’re right that it’s not a high enough earn rate to use a long haul, business companion voucher every year. That’s why I took out an Avios subscription (back when 200k Avios was £1800) to achieve our Japan trip leaving in a couple of months time. In that case, the value of the subscription vs the value of the flights was well worth it, but I wouldn’t buy Avios without a clear goal in mind, and even then, I don’t need to do so every year.
My bigger problem is we want to go places BA/IB/EI doesn’t serve – QR/AQ redemptions look great, but leaves us burning more Avios without using companion vouchers. Perhaps I’ll drop thee BAPP for a couple of years if the vouchers aren’t required… we’ll see!
@travelmonkey – This might be a silly question on my part, when you s/s it – Do you do this manually, or is there a place from your BAEC you can download all your Avios activity?! I can only see recent transactions in mine, but would love to be able to download my entire history! ☺️☺️You can generate a list of 12 months transactions and then save as HTML. Excel or ChatGPT should be to convert to a table. I think that’s the best I’ve found
You can generate a list of 12 months transactions and then save as HTML. Excel or ChatGPT should be to convert to a table. I think that’s the best I’ve found
@masaccio – Now you’ve said it – it seems so obvious! Silly Me 🙈 Thankyou so much! ☺️ I’m off to calculate what my earn rate was in my 2nd year. I imagine much less 😅From my spreadsheet for my last full collection year I earned just shy of 99,500 through flying, 2,500 from nectar and 20k from a compensation following a complaint about delayed bagged.
I don’t have any sort of Amex or Barclays card and I’d rather get TCB than go through the shopping portal.
I don’t know why more people don’t use a spreadsheet to record actual and booked flights (or hotel rooms) so they can track progress towards targets. With my IHG sheet I’m predicting at the moment that I’ll end the year on 67 nights so I know 10 months in advance that I need 3 nights to get diamond so I can do something about it without a last minute panic.
I don’t have any sort of Amex or Barclays card and I’d rather get TCB than go through the shopping portal.
Wow that’s an amazing insight. Apologies for being nosey, but I’m intrigued what you do use. Feel free to ignore that as you wish,
+1 on the spreadsheet for both tracking what you’ve done and predicting where you’re going to be.
I had bad experiences with bath companies and said I would never knowingly deal with them ever again such as having an account or card.
Wow @CocoOnTheGo 👏👏👏
@CocoOnTheGo 👏 indeed!If ever there was a sales pitch for earning points, this is it! 700k buys a lot of business class travel to far flung places. And all for spend you were doing anyway 😎
Spreadsheet is the way to go, last 3 years, 386k @ .27p, 298k @ .28p, 238k @ 33p. Collected from many different sources, credit cards, Nectar, Avios Boost, BA store, Barclays Premier account plus some other odds and ends. It’s become more complex now Player 2 has retired and has an income well below the Amex requirements. 500k was my best year, that was pre covid.
@travelmonkey – This might be a silly question on my part, when you s/s it – Do you do this manually, or is there a place from your BAEC you can download all your Avios activity?! I can only see recent transactions in mine, but would love to be able to download my entire history! ☺️☺️I use Google sheets for my spreadsheeting.
My import process is a bit geeky (I’m a former software engineer now in management). I view my transactions using a custom date range (1st Jan – 31st Dec for the year), copy and paste that into a script I wrote (for those who are technical, its just grep and sed commands piped together – a complete hack and far from elegant!) which spits out CSV which I paste into sheets. I then have a set of XLOOKUPs which categorise each line to create summaries. (I should probably then be using a pivot table but I just have a bunch of SUMIFS)
I’ve had increased signed-up bonuses from Amex business platinum and gold this year
Partner has had increased sign-up bonuses from personal platinum and BA Amex, too
Add in regular monthly avios from Barclays, and we must be close to 350k Avios in the last 12 monthsIn the good old Bendy days, I managed just over one million Avios in 12 months (and five KYB checks)
A quick calculation.
76000 barclaycard, spend and monthly bonus
Nectar 85000 made up of two years worth of collecting transferred to get get the bonus of 14000.
Amex 40000
BA earned on flights 14000Total 215k plus I bought 300000 on the 2024 new year offer.
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